I managed to take another pass at two different short stories over the course of the week last week, and have completely nullified my last post’s claim of order and structure during my periods of short story output. Neither of these two stories, finished and submitted, fall into the mold of The Great Wide World Gone Dark.

Partum is a miserable pile of masculinity, written from the point-of-view of a man who conceived a child with his wife, with whom he then made a joint decision to let the child gestate in an artificial chamber at the hospital so that both parents could continue their careers and lives. You’ve read stories about mothers dying in childbirth, right? Partum is about what might happen if the mother died before childbirth. Long before.

Incidentally, Lis and I are trying to conceive.

Stilts is a story about horror stories, and it had two primary inspirations. One: I think horror is unfairly maligned as a genre lacking strong emotional resonance. Not primal resonance, but emotional. Two: I have learned, too many times, that I have unintentionally hurt someone — even in the smallest fashion — by including a part of their life or experience in my story and perverting it just this side of beyond recognition. So, Stilts is about a writer who perverts the lives around him into wicked stories, and about the people who are capable of recognizing that the soul of such horror is essentially romance.

Hopefully, they’ll both find a home before too long and then they’ll wind up posted here.